It has taken him four months to express his pain, but when Chef Emanuele Lattanzi finally does open up, the emotional Italian in him takes over. “It was horrific,” he says of the gunshots he heard at Vetro, the restaurant he has been running at the Oberoi for three years, before he collected his family and escaped. The image of him carrying his six-month-old Clarice out of the hotel is etched in the mind of anyone who was glued to the TV those three days last November when terrorists struck the city.

“I got lucky, many papas didn’t,” says the 33-year-old. “Bad things happen and you can’t forget them, but I’ve had to move on.”

Lattanzi stayed with someone from the Italian consulate for a few days, where his shock wouldn’t let him read a newspaper or switch on the TV, before returning to Rome on December 5. “I was hounded by the press there, even on Christmas Day they knocked on my door. My wife Lea and I moved to the northern country, but we were followed. I didn’t speak to anyone, so some of them made up quotes,” he says, still discomforted with media attention.

“I came back to India for peace. That, and the fact that I wanted to see my guests. In Italy, we don’t leave without saying goodbye; certainly not with our heads lowered.”

In a few months from its opening, Vetro had become a Bombay landmark. Frequenters would often see Lattanzi walk about the tables chatting with his guests, in the style of those charming Italian trattorias. There was a Swiss gentleman who arrived at the restaurant just as soon as the doors opened, at 7.30 am. “One day, he peeped from the pane of the kitchen door. He saw me have a Bertolli bean soup and wanted to share it with me; we ate it in the kitchen,” the chef recalls. Lattanzi is on first-name basis with many guests, easy in the 56-seater intimate restaurant, especially for a gregarious Italiano.

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